available and disaster tolerant,
etc., but users of applications
only see the service attributes,
not the physical storage itself.
Some of the physical properties
of storage do show through,
including the number and
geographic locations of copies,
and the underlying speed and
cost of the infrastructure. But
overall, users can ignore the
questions of how things are
done and simply choose from
a service catalog and pay per
use. The cloud service providers
must then provide the required
capabilities, at the required
scale and at a cost that permits
an adequate margin for their
organization.
New storage requirements
arise out of the cloud model.
A network data portal that can
ingest data uploads from tenants'
own IT operations, or data feeds
from distributed operations or
the Internet of Things is needed.
Storage infrastructure must be
shared by tenants, be able to
start small with low cost and
quickly scale as large as demand
requires. Cloud tenants must
be securely isolated. Not only
must their data be separated,
but excessive activity by one
tenant must not slow down
others. Above all, the regular
functions of storage operation
must be highly automated. User
onboarding, provisioning services
selected from the catalog and
even troubleshooting should
be handled programmatically,
because systems are too large and
complex for administrators to be
regularly touching. Fortunately,
the cloud model enforces limited
patterns of user behavior. Users
can have any storage they want as
long as it's in the service catalog.
Right behind the idea of clouds
run by service providers is the
pattern of hybrid clouds. An
emerging trend is for established
businesses with their own IT shops to use service
providers to complement their own facilities. An
enterprise could use a cloud for backup or archive
of inactive data, to offload applications during
peak demand or to provide a complete business
process (e.g., email and collaboration for a mobile
workforce). Hybrid clouds require management
oversight that spans both
on-premises and at-cloud
infrastructure, and allows for
application and data mobility
between the facilities. The need
to cooperate with cloud services
that become part of enterprise
Capacity Management
- ROI goes to
the Bottom Line
Wednesday, April 18 | 1 ET / Noon CT
CIOs and other senior executives
look for a return on investment (ROI)
when buying tools or implementing
processes - Capacity Management is
no different.
This presentation will focus on ROI
and how an organization can use
such a return to justify the purchase of
valuable tools such as athene® as well
as the implementation of a process
that will drive an even larger ROI.
FEATURING:
Rich Fronheiser
Director of Product Marketing
Syncsort
Register Today: webcasts.com/ibmsystemsmag
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ibmsystemsmag.com MARCH/APRIL 2018 // 13